Ridgeline Houses An Affront To Nature, Fellow Man

August 11, 2010|By Robert M. Thorson

Look! Up in sky! It's a bird? It's a stationary hang-glider? No, it's a private suburban home perched on a mountainside. Ridgeline development has struck again!

This has always been a bad idea; in the 1960s planner and social scientist William Holly Whyte urged Connecticut to protect its traprock ridges. Some towns did; others, such as West Hartford and Avon, did not.

I've written about this before, and thought I've said all that I had to say on the topic. But this week, I discovered a new argument against this egregious practice. But first, a bit of bombastic bile.

A mega-house perched near the crest of a bedrock cliff goes beyond ostentation and blight. It rubs the salt of hyper-development into the wounds of those who want open spaces preserved because they are forced to see it regularly. It also drops the hot pepper sauce of income disparity in to the eyes of those who live in normal apartments and houses in the settled world below.

My new argument involves dominance. Those who live up high want to lord it over us. So, let's vote them down … literally.

I learned about this while spending a few days working at Lake Winnipesaukee. My beach book was "The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, C. 1830-1865," a scholarly, high-gloss, out-of-print book by Albert Boime. Though this type of gaze might be a wonderful thing to experience for a few exhilarating moments on a mountaintop, it's a lousy one from a household picture window, especially with a TV nearby.

Before reading further, I suggest you recall your last visual of a lighthouse, whether in the flesh or by photo. I'm guessing your image was upward from the ground toward the light, rather than downward from the light toward the ground. Boime would call the former a "reverential gaze," especially when applied to a natural eminence such as a ridge, hill or mountain. Such views support a feeling of unity for everyone looking upward from all around, for example sailors at sea and the people they love on land.

The opposite perspective — from high to low — is the magisterial gaze, which emphasizes command and control over that which lies below. In Boime's words, it "presupposes the spectator as sightseer on the ledge or crest subjugating the boundless reality …The panoramic prospect becomes a metonymic image …of the desire for dominance."

"To the manor born"; twhat's what cliff-toppers must be thinking.

After reading Boime's book, I found myself driving eastward along the northern shore of the lake. In that region, there's a Gilded Age mansion called "Castle in the Clouds," Though to me it's a mote on the mountainside, this blatantly self-aggrandizing construction made sense during that era of flaunted wealth. Similarly, in 1916, Heublein Tower in Connecticut's Talcott Mountain State Park was also built as a private show of wealth. Fortunately, both are now in the public trust as architectural monuments to a bygone era: odd, but interesting. And luckily for us Hueblein Tower was designed to look as nice from below (reverential) as from above (magisterial).

Stapling private mega-houses to bedrock ridges is a marvelous feat of engineering. But it's inappropriate today, given growing deference to a more realistic sense of place, the growing tensions between the haves and have-nots and the energy, runoff and pollution consequences of upland sprawl.

From above is a feeling of dominance and control, the magisterial gaze. From below, millions of residents feel insult upon injury, having no choice but to see a combined display of environmental wrongdoing and unearned dominance.

Theirs, I assure you, is not a reverential gaze.

Robert M. Thorson is a professor of geology at the University of Connecticut's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His column appears every other Thursday. He can be reached at profthorson@yahoo.com.